When polling data showed that an overwhelming 81% of white evangelicals had voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election, commentators across the political spectrum were left aghast. Even for a community that had been tracking further and further right for decades, this support seemed decidedly out of step. How, after all, could an amoral, twice-divorced businessman from New York garner such devoted admiration from the most vociferous of "values voters?" That this same group had, not a century earlier, rallied national support for such progressive causes as a federal minimum wage, child labor laws, and civil rights made the Trump shift even harder to square. In The End of Empathy, John W. Compton presents a nuanced portrait of the changing values of evangelical voters over the course of the last century. To explain the rise of white Protestant social concern in the latter part of the nineteenth century and its sudden demise at the end of the twentieth, Compton argues that religious conviction, by itself, is rarely sufficient to motivate empathetic political behavior. When believers do act empathetically-championing reforms that transfer resources or political influence to less privileged groups within society, for example-it is typically because strong religious institutions have compelled them to do so. Citizens throughout the previous century had sought membership in churches as a means of ensuring upward mobility, but a deterioration of mainline Protestant authority that started in the 1960s led large groups of white suburbanites to shift away from the mainline Protestant churches. There to pick up the slack were larger evangelical congregations with conservative leaders who discouraged attempts by the government to promote a more equitable distribution of wealth and political authority. That shift, Compton argues, explains the larger revolution in white Protestantism that brought us to this political moment.

In the late eighteenth century a small Shaker community travelled to America under the leadership of 'Mother Ann' Lee. The American communities they founded were based on ideals of pacifism, celibacy and gender equality. The texts included in this edition come from first-hand accounts of life in the Shaker communities during the nineteenth century.

Evaluating the writings of one of the most significant religious figures in early modern England, this volume summarizes Owen's life, explores his various intellectual, literary and political contexts, and considers his roles as a preacher, administrator, polemicist and theologian. It explores the importance of Owen, reviews the state of scholarship and suggests new avenues for research. The first part of the volume offers brand-new assessments of Owen's intellectual formation, pastoral ministry, educational reform at Oxford, political connections in the Cromwellian revolution, support of nonconformity during the Restoration, interaction with the scientific revolution and understanding of philosophy. The second part of the volume considers Owen's prolific literary output. A cross-section of well-known and frequently neglected works are reviewed and situated in their historical and theological contexts. The volume concludes by evaluating ways that Owen scholarship can benefit historians, theologians, biblical scholars, ministers and Christian readers.

The Shakers are perhaps the best known of American religious communities. Their ethos and organization had a practical influence on many other communities and on society as a whole. This three volume collection presents writings from a broad cross-section of those who opposed the Shakers and their way of life.

In the mid-twentieth century, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) returned to Nauvoo, Illinois, home to the thriving religious community led by Joseph Smith before his murder in 1844. The quiet farm town became a major Mormon heritage site visited annually by tens of thousands of people. Yet Nauvoo's dramatic restoration proved fraught with conflicts. Scott C. Esplin's social history looks at how Nauvoo's different groups have sparred over heritage and historical memory. The Latter-day Saint project brought it into conflict with the Community of Christ, the Midwestern branch of Mormonism that had kept a foothold in the town and a claim on its Smith-related sites. Non-Mormon locals, meanwhile, sought to maintain the historic place of ancestors who had settled in Nauvoo after the Latter-day Saints' departure. Examining the recent and present-day struggles to define the town, Esplin probes the values of the local groups while placing Nauvoo at the center of Mormonism's attempt to carve a role for itself within the greater narrative of American history.

Why do so many conservative politicians flock to the campuses of Liberty University, Wheaton College, and Bob Jones University? In Fundamentalist U: Keeping the Faith in American Higher Education, Adam Laats shows that these colleges have always been more than just schools; they have been vital intellectual citadels in America's culture wars. They have been unique institutions that have defined what it has meant to be an evangelical and reshaped the landscape of American higher education. In the twentieth century, when higher education sometimes seemed to focus on sports, science, and social excess, conservative evangelical schools offered a compelling alternative. On their campuses, evangelicals debated what it meant to be a creationist, a Christian, a proper American, all within the bounds of Biblical revelation. Instead of encouraging greater personal freedom and deeper pluralist values, conservative evangelical schools have thrived by imposing stricter rules on their students and faculty. If we hope to understand either American higher education or American evangelicalism, we need to understand this influential network of dissenting institutions. Plus, only by making sense of these schools can we make sense of America's continuing culture wars. After all, our culture wars aren't between one group of educated people and another group that has not been educated. Rather, the fight is usually fiercest between two groups that have been educated in very different ways.

The work of John Howard Yoder has become increasingly influential in recent years. Moreover, it is gaining influence in some surprising places. No longer restricted to the world of theological ethicists and Mennonites, Yoder has been discovered as a refreshing voice by scholars working in many other fields. For thirty-five years, Yoder was known primarily as an articulate defender of Christian pacifism against a theological ethics guild dominated by the Troeltschian assumptions reflected in the work of Walter Rauschenbusch and Reinhold and Richard Niebuhr. But in the last decade, there has been a clearly identifiable shift in direction. A new generation of scholars has begun reading Yoder alongside figures most often associated with post-structuralism, neo-Nietzscheanism, and post-colonialism, resulting in original and productive new readings of his work. At the same time, scholars from outside of theology and ethics departments, indeed outside of Christianity itself, like Romand Coles and Daniel Boyarin, have discovered in Yoder a significant conversation partner for their own work. This volume collects some of the best of those essays in hope of encouraging more such work from readers of Yoder and in hopes of attracting others to his important work.

Interview with Allan Carlson

In an ironic twist, American evangelical leaders are joining mainstream acceptance of contraception. Godly Seed: American Evangelicals Confront Birth Control, 1873-1973, examines how mid-twentieth-century evangelical leaders eventually followed the mainstream into a quiet embrace of contraception, complemented by a brief acceptance of abortion. It places this change within the context of historic Christian teaching regarding birth control, including its origins in the early church and the shift in arguments made by the Reformers of the sixteenth century. The book explores the demographic effects of this transition and asks: did the delay by American evangelicals leaders in accepting birth control have consequences?

At the same time, many American evangelicals are rethinking their acceptance of birth control even as a majority of the nation's Roman Catholics are rejecting their church's teaching on the practice. Raised within a religious movement that has almost uniformly condemned abortion, many young evangelicals have begun to ask whether abortion can be neatly isolated from the issue of contraception. A significant number of evangelical families have, over the last several decades, rejected the use of birth control and returned decisions regarding family size to God. Given the growth of the evangelical movement, this pioneering work will have a large-scale impact.

This group biography follows three generations of ministers' daughters and wives in a famed American Unitarian family. Shifting the focus from pulpit to parsonage, and from sermon to whispered secrets, Cynthia Tucker humanizes the Eliots and their religious tradition and lifts up a largely neglected female vocation. Spanning 150 years from the early 19th century forward, the narrative shapes itself into a series of stories. Each of six chapters takes up a different woman's defining experience, from the deaths of numerous children and the anguish of infertility to the suffocation of small parish life with its chronic loneliness, doubt, and resentment. One woman confides in a rare close friend, another in the anonymous readers of magazines that publish her poems. A third escapes from an ill-fitting role by succumbing to neurasthenia, leaving one debilitating condition for another. The matriarch's granddaughters script larger lives, bypassing marriage and churchly employment to follow their hearts into same-sex relationships, and major careers in public health and preschool education. In two concluding chapters, Tucker enlarges the frame to bring in the regular parish women who collectively give voice to issues the ministers' kin must keep to themselves. All of the stories are linked by the women's continuing battles to make themselves heard over clerical wisdom that contradicts their reality.

The unfolding of the American West is paralleled by the evolution of the Mormon religion. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints was founded in 1830 by Joseph Smith. Public hostility to his claims of divine revelations drove the Mormons from New York State to Missouri to Illinois, where Smith was murdered by a furious mob. Leadership was eventually assumed by Brigham Young, who guided his flock westward in search of the 'New Zion'. Legend has it that, when they reached the vast open spaces of the Great Basin, he ended the journey by declaring, 'This is the place'. Building on his critically acclaimed book about the origins of the Mormon faith, Ernest H Taves offers further stylometric analysis of texts from the "Book of Mormon" and recounts the spellbinding story of the cross-continental trek and establishment of the Mormon empire. Covering the years between Smith's assassination in 1844 to the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869, Taves also includes discussion of polygamy and its effect on Utah's petition for statehood, and the economic impact of the 1849 gold rush on the Mormon community. A story of both monumental triumph and intense tragedy, "This is the Place" is a critical yet sympathetic examination of an integral part of American history.

In 1740, Benjamin Franklin published the first American edition of Gospel Sonnets, by the eminent Scottish Presbyterian minister Ralph Erskine. The work, already in its fifth British edition, quickly became an American bestseller and remained so throughout the eighteenth century. Franklin was aware of what most scholars of American religion and literature have forgotten -that poetry played a central role in the "surprising works of God" that birthed evangelicalism. The far-reaching social transformations precipitated by the transatlantic evangelical revivals of the eighteenth century depended upon the development of a major literary form, that of revival poetry. Literary scholars and historians of religion have prioritized sermons, conversion narratives, periodicals, and hymnody. Wendy Roberts here argues that poetry offered a unique capacity to "diffuse celestial Fervor through the World," in the words of the cleric Samuel Davies. Awakening Verse is the first monograph to address this large corpus of evangelical poetry in the American colonies, shedding light on important dimensions of eighteenth-century religious and literary culture. Roberts deftly assembles a large, previously unknown archive of immensely popular poems, examines how literary history has rendered this poetic tradition invisible, and demonstrates how a vibrant popular poetics exercised a substantial effect on the landscape of early American religion, literature, and culture.

Most forms of religion are best understood in the con- text of their relationship with the surrounding culture. This may be particularly true in the United States. Certainly immigrant Catholicism became Americanized; mainstream Protestantism accommodated itself to the modern world; and Reform Judaism is at home in American society. In Evangelicalism, Richard Kyle explores paradoxical adjustments and transformations in the relationship between conservative Protestant Evangelicalism and contemporary American culture.

Evangelicals have resisted many aspects of the modern world, but Kyle focuses on what he considers their romance with popular culture. Kyle sees this as an Americanized Christianity rather than a Christian America, but the two are so intertwined that it is difficult to discern the difference between them. Instead, in what has become a vicious self-serving cycle, Evangelicals have baptized and sanctified secular culture in order to be considered culturally relevant, thus increasing their numbers and success within abundantly populous and populist-driven American society. In doing so, Evangelicalism has become a middle-class movement, one that dominates America's culture, and unabashedly populist.

Many Evangelicals view America as God's chosen nation, thus sanctifying American culture, consumerism, and middle-class values. Kyle believes Evangelicals have served themselves well in consciously and deliberately adjusting their faith to popular culture. Yet he also thinks Evangelicals may have compromised themselves and their future in the process, so heavily borrowing from the popular culture that in many respects the Evangelical subculture has become secularism with a light gilding of Christianity. If so, he asks, can Evangelicalism survive its own popularity and reaffirm its religious origins, or will it assimilate and be absorbed into what was once known as the Great American Melting Pot of religions and cultures? Will the Gospel of the American dream ultimately engulf and destroy the Gospel of Evangelical success in America?

This thoughtful and thought-provoking volume will interest anyone concerned with the modern-day success of the Evangelical movement in America and the aspirations and fate of its faithful.

This study of left-wing puritan and separatist ecclesiology in Elizabethan and Jacobean England explores several major ecclesial motifs, including the relationship of soteriology, eschatology, and puritan covenant thought to ecclesiology; radical puritan and separatist ideals about the government of gathered churches; the role of synodical authority; and the relationship between church and state. Instead of looking at pre-revolutionary dissent in terms of two distinct ecclesiological categories of radical puritan `presbyterians' and separatist `congregationalists', the author underlines the shared ecclesiological ideals of both traditions. While recognizing that there were presbyterian as well as congregational tendencies within each of the two movements, he argues that they were by no means always clear, nor denominationally fixed. It was an ecclesiology still in its infancy, largely untested by the moulding of long-standing, unhindered practice, and bearing within itself the possibilities of development in more than one direction. For this reason, radical puritan polity would prove to be a rich and many-layered source, providing an ideology that could be manipulated by both Independents and Presbyterians for historical support of their respective polities, when denominationalism began in the mid- seventeenth century.

David Brainerd is simultaneously one of the most enigmatic and recognizable figures in American religious history. Born in 1718 and known for his missionary work among the Indians (as well as for being expelled from Yale), Brainerd and the story of his life entered the realm of legend almost immediately upon his death at the age of twenty-nine.
Much of his reputation is based on the picture of Brainerd constructed by Jonathan Edwards in his best-selling Life of David Brainerd. This new biography seeks to restore Brainerd to the context of the culture in which he lived. Combining archival research with the most recent scholarship on the Great Awakening and Indian missions, John A. Grigg argues that Brainerd was shaped by two formative experiences. On the one hand, he was the child of a prosperous, well-respected Connecticut family that was part of the political and social establishment. On the other, he was a participant in one of the more fundamental challenges to that establishment-the religious revivals of the 1740s. Brainerd's work among the Indians, Grigg argues, was a way to combine the sense of order and tradition inherited from his family with his radical experiences in the revival movement. Moving beyond biography, Grigg also examines how the myth of Brainerd came to be. He argues that both Edwards and John Wesley crafted their versions of Brainerd's life in order to address specific problems in their own churches, and he examines how subsequent generations of evangelicals utilized Brainerd for their own purposes.
The Lives of David Brainerd is the first truly scholarly biography of Brainerd, drawing on everything from town records and published sermons to hand-written fragments to tell the story not only of his life, but of his legend. The David Brainerd who emerges from this work is a man who is both familiar and remarkably new.

The Unitarian Universalist religious movement is small in numbers, but has a long history as a radical, reforming movement within Protestantism, coupled with a larger, liberal social witness to the world. Both Unitarianism and Universalism began as Christian denominations, but rejected doctrinal constraints to embrace a human views of Jesus, an openness to continuing revelation, and a loving God who, they believed, wanted to be reconciled with all people. In the twentieth century Unitarian Universalism developed beyond Christianity and theism to embrace other religious perspectives, becoming more inclusive and multi-faith. Efforts to achieve justice and equality included civil rights for African-Americans, women and gays and lesbians, along with strident support for abortion rights, environmentalism and peace. Today the Unitarian Universalist movement is a world-wide faith that has expanded into several new countries in Africa, continued to develop in the Philippines and India, while maintaining historic footholds in Romania, Hungary, England, and especially the United States and Canada. This second edition of Historical Dictionary of Unitarian Universalism contains a chronology, an introduction, an appendix, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 400 cross-referenced entries on people, places, events and trends in the history of the Unitarian and Universalist faiths including American leaders and luminaries, important writers and social reformers. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Unitarian Universalism.

This case study examines the history of the Netherlandic Mennonite community living in and around Hamburg after the Thirty Years War. Based on detailed archival research, it expands the scope of Radical Reformation studies to include the confessional age (c. 1550-1750). During this period Mennonites had to conform politically while trying to preserve many of the nonconformist ideals of their forebears, such as the refusal to baptize children, bear arms and swear solemn oaths. The research presented in Obedient Heretics will, therefore, be of interest to scholars of minority communities in addition to those concerned with the Reformation's legacy, confessionalization and confessional identity.

The Mormon Culture of Salvation presents a comprehensive study of Mormon cultural and religious life, offering important new theories of Mormonism - one of the fastest growing movements and thought by many to be the next world religion. Bringing social, scientific and theological perspectives to bear on the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Douglas Davies draws from theology, history of religions, anthropology, sociology and psychology to present a unique example of a truly interdisciplinary analysis in religious studies. Examining the many aspects of Mormon belief, ritual, family life and history, this book presents a new interpretation of the origin of Mormonism, arguing that Mormonism is rooted in the bereavement experience of Joseph Smith, which influenced the development of temple ritual for the dead and the genealogical work of many Mormon families. Davies shows how the Mormon commitment to work for salvation relates to current Mormon belief in conversion, and to traditional Christian ideas of grace. The Mormon Culture of Salvation is an important work for Mormons and non-Mormons alike, offering fresh insights into how Mormons see the world and work for their future glory in heavenly realms. Written by a non-Mormon with over 30 years' research experience into Mormonism, this book is essential reading for those seeking insights into new interdisciplinary forms of analysis in religion, as well as all those studying or interested in Mormonism and world religions. Douglas J. Davies is Professor in the Study of Religion in the Department of Theology, Durham University, UK. He is the author of many books including Death, Ritual and Belief (Cassell, 1997), Mormon Identities in Transition (Cassell, 1994), Mormon Spirituality (1987), and Meaning and Salvation in Religious Studies (Brill, 1984).

Current facts about Mormonism *Over 11 million members. *Over 60,000 full-time missionaries---more than any other single missionary-sending organization in the world. *More than 310,000 converts annually. *As many as eighty percent of converts come from Protestant backgrounds. (In Mormon circles, the saying is, We baptize a Baptist church every week. ) *Within fifteen years, the numbers of missionaries and converts will roughly double. *Within eighty years, with adherents exceeding 267 million, Mormonism could become the first world-religion to arise since Islam. You may know the statistics. What you probably don t know are the advances the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) is making in apologetics and academic respectability. With superb training, Mormon scholars outclass many of their opponents. Arguments against Mormon claims are increasingly refuted as outdated, misinformed, or poorly argued. The New Mormon Challenge is a response to the burgeoning challenge of scholarly Mormon apologetics. Written by a team of respected Christian scholars, it is free of caricature, sensationalism, and diatribe. The respectful tone and responsible, rigorous, yet readable scholarship set this book in a class of its own. The New Mormon Challenge recycles no previous material and duplicates no one s efforts. Instead, responding to the best LDS scholarship, it offers freshly researched and well-documented rebuttals of Mormon truth claims. Most of the chapter topics have never been addressed, and the criticisms and arguments are almost entirely new. But The New Mormon Challenge does not merely challenge Mormon beliefs; it offers the LDS Church and her members ways to move forward. The New Mormon Challenge will help you understand the intellectual appeal of Mormonism, and it will reveal many of the fundamental weaknesses of the Mormon worldview. Whether you are sharing the gospel with Mormons or are investigating Mormonism for yourself, this book will help you accurately understand Mormonism and see the superiority of the historic Christian faith. Outstanding scholarship and sound methodology make this an ideal textbook. The biblical, historical, scientific, philosophical, and theological discussions are fascinating and will appeal to Christians and Mormons alike. Exemplifying Christian scholarship at its best, The New Mormon Challenge pioneers a new genre of literature on Mormonism. The Editors Francis J. Beckwith (Ph.D., Fordham University), Carl Mosser (Ph.D. candidate, University of St. Andrews), and Paul Owen (Ph.D., University of Edinburgh) are respected authorities on the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the authors of various books and significant articles on Mormonism. Their individual biographies as well as information on the book s contributors appear inside. With contributors including such respected scholars as Craig L. Blomberg, William Lane Craig, J. P. Moreland, and others, The New Mormon Challenge is, as Richard Mouw states in his foreword, an important event for both Protestant evangelicals and Mormons that models to the evangelical community what it is like to engage in respectful and meaningful exploration of a viewpoint with which we disagree on key points. In recent years, Mormon scholars have produced a body of literature that has been largely ignored by evangelicals. This current volume takes a giant step forward in correcting this oversight in a way that is both intellectually vigorous, yet respectful. ---Ken Mulholland, President, Salt Lake Theological Seminary Intellectually serious evangelical responses to the faith of the Latter-day Saints have been depressingly rare. This book represents a significant contribution to a conversation that, really, has just begun. ---Daniel Peterson, Brigham Young University; Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies (FARMS) Finally we have a book from evangelicals in which the authors have made"

The five-volume Oxford History of Dissenting Protestant Traditions series is governed by a motif of migration ('out-of-England'). It first traces organized church traditions that arose in England as Dissenters distanced themselves from a state church defined by diocesan episcopacy, the Book of Common Prayer, the Thirty-Nine Articles, and royal supremacy, but then follows those traditions as they spread beyond England -and also traces newer traditions that emerged downstream in other parts of the world from earlier forms of Dissent. Secondly, it does the same for the doctrines, church practices, stances toward state and society, attitudes toward Scripture, and characteristic patterns of organization that also originated in earlier English Dissent, but that have often defined a trajectory of influence independent ecclesiastical organizations. The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume II charts the development of protestant Dissent between the passing of the Toleration Act (1689) and the repealing of the Test and Corporation Acts (1828). The long eighteenth century was a period in which Dissenters slowly moved from a position of being a persecuted minority to achieving a degree of acceptance and, eventually, full political rights. The first part of the volume considers the history of various dissenting traditions inside England. There are separate chapters devoted to Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Baptists and Quakers-the denominations that traced their history before this period-and also to Methodists, who emerged as one of the denominations of 'New Dissent' during the eighteenth century. The second part explores that ways in which these traditions developed outside England. It considers the complexities of being a Dissenter in Wales and Ireland, where the state church was Episcopalian, as well as in Scotland, where it was Presbyterian. It also looks at the development of Dissent across the Atlantic, where the relationship between church and state was rather looser. Part three is devoted to revivalist movements and their impact, with a particular emphasis on the importance of missionary societies for spreading protestant Christianity from the late eighteenth century onwards. The fourth part looks at Dissenters' relationship to the British state and their involvement in the campaigns to abolish the slave trade. The final part discusses how Dissenters lived: the theology they developed and their attitudes towards scripture; the importance of both sermons and singing; their involvement in education and print culture and the ways in which they expressed their faith materially through their buildings.

Plain tells the story of Mary Alice Hostetter's journey to define an authentic self amid a rigid religious upbringing in a Mennonite farm family. Although endowed with a personality "prone toward questioning and challenging," the young Mary Alice at first wants nothing more than to be a good girl, to do her share, and-alongside her eleven siblings-to work her family's Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, farm. She feels fortunate to have been born into a religion where, as the familiar hymn states, she is "safe in the arms of Jesus." As an adolescent, that keen desire for belonging becomes focused on her worldly peers, even though she knows that Mennonites consider themselves a people apart. Eventually she leaves behind the fields and fences of her youth, thinking she will finally be able to grow beyond the prohibitions of her church. Discovering and accepting her sexuality, she once again finds herself apart, on the outside of family, community, and societal norms. This quietly powerful memoir of longing and acceptance casts a humanizing eye on a little-understood American religious tradition and a woman's striving to grow within and beyond it.

In Pure, Linda Kay Klein uses a potent combination of journalism, cultural commentary, and memoir to take us "inside religious purity culture as only one who grew up in it can" (Gloria Steinem) and reveals the devastating effects evangelical Christianity's views on female sexuality has had on a generation of young women. In the 1990s, a "purity industry" emerged out of the white evangelical Christian culture. Purity rings, purity pledges, and purity balls came with a dangerous message: girls are potential sexual "stumbling blocks" for boys and men, and any expression of a girl's sexuality could reflect the corruption of her character. This message traumatized many girls-resulting in anxiety, fear, and experiences that mimicked the symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder-and trapped them in a cycle of shame. This is the sex education Linda Kay Klein grew up with. Fearing being marked a Jezebel, Klein broke up with her high school boyfriend because she thought God told her to and took pregnancy tests despite being a virgin, terrified that any sexual activity would be punished with an out-of-wedlock pregnancy. When the youth pastor of her church was convicted of sexual enticement of a twelve-year-old girl, Klein began to question purity-based sexual ethics. She contacted young women she knew, asking if they were coping with the same shame-induced issues she was. These intimate conversations developed into a twelve-year quest that took her across the country and into the lives of women raised in similar religious communities-a journey that facilitated her own healing and led her to churches that are seeking a new way to reconcile sexuality and spirituality. Pure is "a revelation... Part memoir and part journalism, Pure is a horrendous, granular, relentless, emotionally true account" (The Cut) of society's larger subjugation of women and the role the purity industry played in maintaining it. Offering a prevailing message of resounding hope and encouragement, "Pure emboldens us to escape toxic misogyny and experience a fresh breath of freedom" (Glennon Doyle, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Love Warrior and founder of Together Rising).

In 1945, Elsie C. Bechtel left her Ohio home for the tiny French commune of Lavercantiere, where for nearly three years she cared for children displaced by the ravages of war. Bechtel's diary, photographs, and letters home to her family provide the central texts of this study. From 1945 to 1948, she recorded her encounters with French society and her immersion in the spare beauty of rural France. From her daily work came passionate musings on the emotional world of human interactions and evocative observations of the American, Spanish, and French co-workers and children with whom she lived. As a volunteer with the Mennonite Central Committee (MCC), Bechtel was part of the war relief efforts of pacifist Quakers and Anabaptists. In France between 1939 and 1948, MCC programs distributed clothing, shared food, and sheltered refugee children. The work began in the far southwest of France but, by the time Bechtel completed her service in 1948, had moved to the Alsace region, where French Mennonites clustered. Bechtel's writings emerged from a religious context that included much travel, but little reflection on the significance of that travel. Yet, religiously motivated travel-an old tradition in southwest France-shaped Bechtel's life. The authors consider her experiences in terms of religious pilgrimage and reflect on their own pilgrimage to Lavercantiere in 2006 for a reunion with some of the people marked by the broader effort that Bechtel joined. To understand Bechtel's experiences and prose, the authors examined archival sources on MCC's work in France, gathered oral and written narratives of participants, and researched other war relief efforts in Spain and France in the 1930s and 1940s. Drawing on these various contexts, the authors establish the complexity, but also the significance, of pilgrimage and humanitarian service as intercultural exchanges.